Starlight

As you gaze into the brilliance of a starlit sky, photons of light, traveling millions of light years past exploding super-novas, gigantic clouds of interstellar gas, black holes larger than our solar system and untold billions of stars and planets, finally reach their destination; your retina. At the back of your eye, each photon is transformed into an electronic pulse which your brain miraculously incorporates into consciousness, the thing that is called you.

This particle of light, flying into your eyeball at 186,000 miles per second, comes directly from the fiery depths of a thermonuclear explosion. The intensity of that explosion, besides giving birth to the photon that is destined to become you, also heats objects tens of millions of miles away. It is hot enough to vaporize every element in existence. It is bright enough to be seen a quadrillion miles away.

What we actually experience of this far-off explosion, though exquisitely beautiful to behold, is but the smallest part of the whole, a sliver of a sliver of the magnificent grandeur and brilliance of its beginning.

Likewise, as we walk with Yahweh, the creator of all things, our lives are graced with incredible revelation and knowledge, an avalanche of truth and beauty so over-reaching that it is impossible to retain its abundance. And, yet, it is but the barest sliver of the Life from which it bursts forth. It is no more than a reminder of the place from which we were born, and to which we will someday return. Even the Holy Spirit, Himself, is but a small earnest of who is to come to each of us.

There are times when the sound of a symphony, the brilliant golden hues of a sunset, or the eternal rhythm of water upon the shore of the sea evoke a primal feeling of indescribable perfection, a brilliant burst of energy from before the birth of time. It is the fading voice of the Creator birthing life itself; an echo of the very words that proclaimed “Let there be light!”

It is a voice we long to hear clearly once more, the faintest memory of the voice of a Father we left behind. One day, our whole earth will suffer under the fulness of His voice; an explosion of such intensity that even the heavens will shake and elements melt, the universe rolling up as a closing scroll. The voice of Yahweh, screaming like a woman giving birth, will fill the earth as He comes to take His children from this world, destroying His enemies and ending the suffering of all His creation.

“The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork.